The Pirate Bay shuts down its trackers

The site The Pirate Bay, referencing files for sharing on BitTorrent, had been attacked in Italy and the Netherlands, and heavily sentenced in Sweden. The film and music industries had obtained sentences of one year of jail and € 2.7 million compensation.

In order to save some money, The Pirate Bay announced today the end of its BitTorrent trackers. (A tracker is a server to organize the transfer of files between peers.)

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The cessation of trackers also helps the site legally, since it only references the downloadable files and doesn't act technically.

Since the democratization of DHT (Distributed Hash Table or shared tracker) and PEX (Peer Exchange, to exchange without tracker) on most BitTorrent clients, Tracker becomes less essential. In addition, the magnet links can start a download without using a .torrent file.

So The Pirate Bay will become a site referencing the magnet links instead of .torrent files.

It results in a good kick in the butt of art industry. As their actions have led to this system fully distributed, it's now impossible to identify a "guilt" to pay an extravagant compensation of several million.

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A priori, it seems that the tracker OpenBittorrent (hosted on a The Pirate Bay's server) continues to operate. This open tracker allows anyone to use it easily, without registration or obligation.